Literary objectification renders colonized people dead before any physical violence.

Evidence

The Arab of Camus’s making is nameless, faceless, and referred to only as the “Arab.” Millions of readers only know Meursault’s victim as “the Arab.” His existence is narrowed and compressed into an object—far from a living being—left for dead on the book’s pages and the beaches of his colonized homeland. The Arab was flatlined by Camus’s pen before Meursault shot him, rendered dead by an objectification that stripped him of a name or face, a past and present, which add flesh to figures and unfold objects into individuals. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1172

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and the reader’s global-synthesis lens on how representational violence precedes physical violence.
• SEED: Angle: how dehumanizing narrative framing in canonical literature functions as a permission structure for later state violence.
• DEFINE: Defines the mechanism by which naming/face-giving versus objectification maps onto moral standing.